A crumble with tea: Pakistan’s Test collapses are now a template

To say that Pakistan have one single problem in test cricket would be fatally generous; there is little pace in the tank, the bowling has tended to be flat and frequently pedestrian, the fielding not particularly inspiring, and the on-field decision-making insipid and often too defensive. Day 1 of the first test match of the three scheduled between Pakistan and England validates almost all of these. The day’s play ended with England in a commanding position, trailing by just 59 runs with 8 wickets in hand. Before proceedings even began, Pakistan lost recently re-appointed captain Babar Azam right when he had found his richest vein of form (in years) to a finger injury, putting the team on the back foot. And after being put into bat, stand-in captain Salman Ali Agha said Pakistan would have batted first at either outcome of the toss, a statement that aged poorly very quickly as the team found itself at 6-2 within the first five overs. Most of these issues, however, start to seem somewhat passable once you turn your head towards Pakistan’s recent outings with the bat. Again, using ‘recent’ as a qualifier here is also being fatally generous. Pakistan’s Azan Awais (C-behind) is trapped leg-before-wicket (LBW) on the opening day of the first Test match between England and Pakistan at Headingley cricket ground in Leeds, northern England on August 19, 2026. — AFP It was never a good omen when Azan Awaiz was trapped LBW to start things off — the first time in Pakistan’s 74-year-old cricketing history that the team lost a wicket on the first ball of a series — or that Pakistan’s most hopeful moment in the first session was when it was interrupted by rain. However, when play resumed, Pakistan were briefly validated for their decision to bat. Imam-ul-Haq and Abdullah Shafique — who came back into the side for the last test in the Caribbean, scoring a brilliant unbeaten 160 on return — put up a brisk, almost chanceless partnership. At 97-2, it seemed that the damage of the morning had more or less been repaired. After Imam-ul-Haq edged a fuller delivery by Josh Tongue to second slip, Pakistan still had three recognisable batters yet to come, with Shafique already steady at the crease, having notched his half-century. Efforts to elongate the batting line-up by playing four bowlers instead of five, though, don’t amount to much when the line-up itself shows few signs of longevity. After losing the third wicket at 97, the team then deflated to 117-4, as Saud Shakeel failed to review an LBW that had grounds for reversal in time, which turned into 118-5 as Abdullah Shafique fell to the sort of fuller delivery that Ollie Robinson had metronomically sent down since the start of play. England’s Ollie Robinson (L) celebrates after taking the wicket of Pakistan’s Azan Awais on the opening day of the first Test match between England and Pakistan at Headingley cricket ground in Leeds, northern England on August 19, 2026. — AFP Pakistan’s last five wickets fell for just 21 runs, with the innings folding at 171, the first time this decade that the team did not breach the 200 mark in the first innings of a test this decade. It would be disingenuous to discredit Robinson and Tongue, who amazingly split the spoils with five wickets each, but Pakistan’s collapsing tendencies have become too much of a self-referencing template for these patches of play to be solely attributed to bowling quality. What has particularly damned this Pakistan side over the last few years of test cricket, more so than errors in team composition, is how much they lack the grit to minimise damage and grind their way through moments of weakness. Since the beginning of 2025, Pakistan has not added a hundred runs to the score after losing the fifth wicket, the worst of these being collapses of 11-5 against Bangladesh and three consecutive five-wicket collapses against South Africa for 16, 17 and 17 runs respectively. That is sixteen consecutive innings in a row where the most runs the team’s bottom half has made has been 76. England’s Emilio Gay (R) edges the ball to be caught out on the opening day of the first Test match between England and Pakistan at Headingley cricket ground in Leeds, northern England on August 19, 2026. — AFP What is particularly puzzling is that these collapses also often follow promising, healthy partnerships — such as Imam and Abdullah’s 91-run stand in Leeds, or Babar and Abdullah’s 168-run effort against the West Indies in the match before. This might indicate that, if extracted, Pakistan might have enough batting potential in the tank to at least make some progress towards the results the side desperately needs, but that has not been close to being met for an alarming chunk of the recent past. However, it also reflects a deeper lack of planning and awareness, criticisms that have been cited and regurgitated towards the team at perhaps every incident and occasion of note in the last few years. Dark rain clouds roll in after play began on the opening day of the first Test match between England and Pakistan at Headingley cricket ground in Leeds, northern England on August 19, 2026. — AFP It indicates that the team folds in the face of panic easily, and that once a collapse of this kind is instigated, there is not much the bowling side has to do to conclude it with fruition. It shows that there are no — or defective, if any — contingencies in place for the type of scenario that the batting line-up tends to find itself in more often than not. It also indicates a lack of patience and sensibility in temperament, and that Pakistan has not yet been able to find the achievable medium of scoring good, quick runs that are also attritional and not ultimately self-destructive. It does not help that Pakistan does not tend to start well — Pakistan’s average of just above 23 for opening partnerships is the worst for all test-playing teams barring Ireland since the start of 2024. These problems compound in spectacular fashion the later it is in the game, which does not bode well as we move further into this series, with the team having the lowest batting average (19.9) for the fourth-innings out of all teams in the current WTC cycle. Combined with the tail often faltering completely — adding zero runs for the last 3 wickets in the second test against the West Indies, for example, the overall picture of Pakistan’s batting does not make for aspirational or reassuring viewing. Though it is still early days in this particular series, this is another WTC cycle that Pakistan has languished away, sitting only above the West Indies. With other sides showing encouraging, progressive signs of improvement, such as Bangladesh, who scored a seminal away victory against Australia after their dismantling of Pakistan earlier this year, these consistent problems will have to be addressed quickly for Pakistan to retain any sort of competitiveness in test cricket, both in this cycle and the next. It remains to be seen whether this concerning trend is remedied any time soon, or if more teams should start investing in power tools to saw balls in half for keepsakes after taking frequent five-wicket chunks out of Pakistan, as Robinson and Tongue did yesterday.